Preclinical Screening For New Anticancer Agents

Preclinical screening procedures for anticancer agents have evolved from empirical to target-oriented screens and have contributed to the approval of a number of molecularly targeted drugs over the past decade. This chapter reviews historical in vitro and in vivo screens, the currently used cell-based as well as cell-free high-throughput screens. Tailored, secondary predictive screening procedures employing primary patient tumors and clonogenic or nude mouse xenograft assays are also described. Examples of approved drugs that have been developed based on a particular screening approach and future perspectives for finding novel and more potent drugs are discussed.